Software is eating the world and only Apple’s hardware will save us.

Kieran Healy:

Apple has historically been a company with a strong desire for control and a keen eye towards its own interests, as perceived in the light of that desire to control things. That has led them to the “Walled Garden” in the older sense. The company is a bit friendlier than before, these days, but in many ways as controlling as it ever was. Now it seems that their central business interest is leading them to actually enact the vision of strongly-encrypted, private computing devices, whose content is inaccessible even to their manufacturer—and all in the face of direct opposition from the State. That’s something that many soi disant Valley anarchists have claimed to have wanted for a long time. But most of them work for or founded companies that are in the business of collecting and selling information, not hardware. Apple is a hardware company. And that’s why they’re out in front of this.